


Where We Are

by BrokeTheLights



Category: Little Nightmares (Video Game)
Genre: Cave, Communication, Enjoy!, Fire, Fluff, Not a ship fic, Post-Canon, Six is quiet, Talking, Theoretically Canon-Compliant, mentions of the Pale City, please don't take it as such, this one's mostly just me thinking about stuff and putting it into a document, we'll find out when the second game comes out if it is actually complaint tho haha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:22:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28844523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrokeTheLights/pseuds/BrokeTheLights
Summary: Six and Mono have found a place to rest for a little while, but Mono keeps thinking about what the future holds. The ends of their stories are so uncertain, and the worries of what comes next are prevalent in his mind. He just wishes he could discuss his worries in a true back-and-forth conversation with the one person he's travelled with the longest and trusts the most, but Six is a peculiar person, and hasn't spoken a word since they've met.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 92





	Where We Are

**Author's Note:**

> So I literally just wrote this up, not entirely sure if it's great but I hope it's good enough for y'all to get some enjoyment out of it! Also, as you all can tell, this fic was written before the second game comes out, so if it turns out that this is wildly canon-noncompliant, then whoops haha it's an AU piece I guess!  
> Also this piece will be breaking my mold for this account, and actually posting a second fic for a piece of media that I love, so who knows, maybe I'll do the same for something else. Anyways, take care, and enjoy the fic!

“What would happen if we grew up?”

The little girl, Six, looked over towards the one who had spoken, her friend Mono, with a small frown on her lips. The pair of them were seated in a small cave area, just on the edge of the forest, as a small fire burned between them. They’d journeyed into the City beyond the forest, and past the seaside in between already, and after many complications had made it back alive, together. Mono raised his hand for a second, as though to wave off a question Six hadn’t asked.

“I mean,” he rephrased, “we’ve gotta grow up at some point, right? But growing up means that we’ll get bigger than we are now, we’ll have to turn into adults, and the adults are all corrupted, if all the giants we’ve seen are all adults. So what would happen to us?”

Six pulled the hood of her bright yellow raincoat down a little from her face, then looked Mono in the eyes through her long black bangs. Mono could feel her trying to find an answer in his face, now that it was revealed. He usually wore a brown paper bag mask over his head, to hide himself away from the rest of the world, but Mono and Six had grown very accustomed to each other’s presence, and trusted each other enough to show a little of who they were to the other. A couple minutes after they’d settled down in the cave Mono had removed his precious mask, though Six had kept her face covered up until then. Mono tried to fight the slight blush that threatened to bloom over his cheeks as Six continued to analyse him. Then she shrugged, and Mono sighed as he put a hand on his discarded mask next to him.

“I would hope that we would be able to continue as we are,” Mono mused, and Six slipped the hood completely off of her head so that she could listen closer to what Mono had to say. “It’d be very sad if one or both of us got turned into one of those monsters permanently. Are those giants even from the same people as we are though? They’re not like you, or me I suppose, they don’t act the same as us. They’re so big and vicious, I find it hard to believe that they’re even from the same species as we are. They might as well be bears in human skin, and us simply mice beneath their feet.”

Six hummed, though her voice was rough and unused, and shifted towards the fire a little more. She seemed invested in what he had to say, so Mono continued.

“I wonder how big we’d get, anyways. If we were to grow up in a different world, I mean. We’re so small in this world, and growing up without all the insanity would probably keep us some level of small… but however small we would be compared to the rest of the world years from now has got to be bigger than the size we are right now, right? A friend of mine, previously, she grew to be three whole inches taller than the rest of us, before she was too big to sneak around. She got caught after a couple months. But it was incredible how tall she’d gotten!”

Mono looked back over to the entrance of the cave. Six looked over as well, but she didn’t seem to see the appeal in staring wistfully out of the entrance, for she quickly looked back at Mono while she waited for him to continue. Mono simply relished in the silence for a couple of seconds, while he felt Six’s impatience for the rest of his thoughts about the world they lived in continue to grow.

Six was a strange person, Mono had come to learn, for though she nearly never spoke herself, she loved to listen to what others had to say. She was a story-sponge, one that would take the tales she heard to her grave before she told them to another living soul. She’d heard that little lost things get forgotten if they never share their stories, and she’d been determined to lose herself while keeping afloat those who wanted to stay. Sometimes Mono could respect that about her, but other times it frustrated him. Those times, when he just wanted to hear her voice, have her tell him something about her past for once before she faded into oblivion one day, those times were when the pair of them struggled to stick together. Right then, Mono was fine with being the only one to speak, but he felt a small ting of that frustration in his chest as the silence grew longer and longer.

“Anyways,” Mono finally said, and Six jumped a little at the sudden break in the quiet, “sometimes I stay up a little too long thinking about what we might become if we grow up. It seems likely that we’ll be able to survive at least for a while longer, you’ve got good instincts and wits, and I’ve got the strength to wield small weapons. But what comes after that? I worry about what we may find the future holds for us.”

Six nodded a little, and Mono looked down at the cave floor below him.

“I worry about you, too,” Mono said quietly, to which Six gave him an odd look. “I just want to talk with you sometimes, not just at you. I know you listen, I know I’m not just talking to myself, but, well… sometimes it feels that way.”

Six sat back from the fire and stared into the flames that laped before her, and Mono sighed. He had known she wasn’t going to speak up now after her many weeks of silence with him, to retort him, but he’d at least hoped.  _ Oh well _ , he thought,  _ it was worth a shot _ .

“Where should we go now?” asked Mono, and Six’s eyes briefly flicked up to him before returning to the fire. “We’ve been to the City, we’ve explored this Wilderness. You’ve had your fair share of the ocean, and from what I’ve heard of it, I’d rather not go to see it. So what’s left for us to do now, in the spirit of keeping on a moving trail?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Six.

For a second Mono continued to stare at the cave floor as he thought to himself, then Six’s words got through his head. His eyes widened and he snapped his head up to look at the girl before him. She had a small blush coating her extraordinarily pale cheeks, and for just that moment Mono could almost convince himself that he’d simply imagined he’d heard her.

Six whispered again, however, with her broken, misused voicebox, and Mono’s conviction broke apart. “I don’t know where we should go, or what we’ll become sometime in the future. All I know is that I must survive, else all that I’ve seen, heard, and done will be for nothing.”

“I-” Mono stopped himself. He didn’t want to say something that would make Six stop talking with him, but he couldn’t think of what to say besides something along the lines of ‘so you  _ can _ talk’.

Thankfully Six spoke for him, though the crackling fire made her soft words nearly unintelligible. “I like where we are, though. This moment, this cave… we’re safe here, for a little while anyways. I’ve seen the passing of many, many lives, most younger than I am, but here… here is not haunted by the ghosts of lost souls, so far as I can tell. So maybe we should consider where we wish to go next after we’ve stayed our welcome here. Then we can think about what the future holds, and worry about what kind of vicious beasts we’ll become when we grow up.”

Mono sat struck with awe, before he came to himself again and nodded. “O-okay. That’s fair, I suppose. We’ll stay a couple more days, until the hours start to feel like hazards waiting to fall down upon our heads, without thinking ahead. You… you sound surprisingly wise. Where’d you get that?”

Six smiled a little bit, a drastic change from her usually downturned lips. “Little lost things find their ways to me, and tell me snippets of their lives, even when I don’t want them to, even when I give them nothing in return. They tell me about the world, about things I will never see, then they vanish from my life forever. There’s nothing that could remove their words from my mind, their stories from my scarred soul, so I keep them close to my chest and try to learn what little I can from them. If that sounds like wisdom to you, then maybe we both haven’t seen enough of life to really know what ‘wise’ is.”

“I understand,” Mono, and Six tilted her head at him with what he assumed was confusion. “I mean, that we haven’t lived enough yet. I get that. We’ll stay here for a couple nights, then maybe we’ll head back through the City, see if we can catch sight of some of the others flitting between the street lights as we wander to new lands beyond. We might be able to get some good food then too, but for now, we’ll simply live as we are, with the scraps we have and the safety in our shelter.”

A calm quiet filled the cave as the fire spat out some particularly feisty sparks, then Mono looked Six in the eyes. “Will we talk more in the future?”

“I thought we agreed we wouldn’t talk about the future right now,” Six whispered with a little bit of teasing, but her smile had since vanished.

“I- we won’t,” Mono conceded, and he looked down at the fire as he shifted into a laying down position.

The sun was falling from the sky and the shadows in the caves grew more imposing as the pair of them finally started to settle down for the night. Mono felt as though their conversation wasn’t over, not yet, but he didn’t fully know how he should continue. The moon peeked into the cave entrance and Mono laid his head down on his paper bag to try and get some sleep, while he tried to pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist. Then, just before he went to sleep, he heard Six whisper one last time, as though not to him but to herself.

“We might talk again,” she said, “but not for a while. My voice was never meant to be used, my soul was never meant to be bared. But if you insist upon it… we’ll talk again, sometime. I like the feeling of being listened to by you.”

The sounds of Six laying herself down as the fire began to die filled Mono’s heart with something akin to hope, and he closed his eyes. There was so much to worry about, so many things that he could get up and try to do before the morning’s rays shone over him, to prepare for what the future may hold. But there was also simply being in that moment, and as sleep began to take him, Mono couldn’t think of anywhere else he would rather be, than the safety of that little cave.


End file.
